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  From now on, he would be the butt of a thousand jokes, jolly farces and banter in smarmy Cockney pubs and gambling parlors, where would spread the tale of James Gordon’s burlesque command aboard the HMS Absurd. His name would float forever in tobacco smoke and weedy rums, and in time, his mother and grandmother would hear the story and the laughter.

  He touched the white linen of his shirt. He had run out of his cabin in only his shirt and breeches. No jacket, no hat, no sign of his rightful rank.

  On the dock, someone was laughing. Then someone else joined in, then some women. So it began.

  The monkey showed its teeth and spat at him.

  The Great Heart

  The mountain top, the meadow plain,

  The winding creek, the shady lane …

  Those sunny paths were all our own,

  And you and I were there alone.

  Francis Scott Key to his sister Anne about their childhood.

  TERRA RUBRA PLANTATION,

  FREDERICK COUNTY, MARYLAND

  JULY OF 1791

  “WHAT DO YOU SEE over the wall, Frankie?”

  “Madam, I am not a giraffe.”

  “Do you think you’ll be taller next year? Enough to see far away?”

  “I will see as far as I need to see in this earthy life. Please be patient.”

  Tucked in the cuff of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the boy Frankie and his sister huddled behind a tall curved brick wall, spying. At the age of twelve, this was Frankie’s first year to see over the wall and still he could only get his nose to the wall’s stone-blocked top and only by tilting his head back. As yet, Anne had no hope of looking over it and relied upon her brother to be the master spy. That was well, because Anne preferred to have tales told to her, while Frankie yearned to be in them.

  And this would be a tale like those. Frankie anticipated making grand orations about the day the whole world visited his parents’ plantation. With his chin up on the top brick of the divider between the grounds and the courtyard where his father addressed the slaves every morning, he closed his wide blue eyes and inhaled deeply. The aroma of venison, turkey, ham and pheasant dizzied him as he imagined the bustle going on in the cookhouses. Already he was mad with hunger at the scent of baking—bread, sweet pastries, muffins in the hundreds tumbling forth from a four-day frenzy of cooking. This was the great day, an appointment with destiny. A bead of perspiration broke between the boy’s drawn brows.

  He and his sister were accustomed to their home’s being the meeting house of Frederick County. Their parents’ hospitality drew every gadfly in Maryland to the ever-open gates. Every traveler from old soldier to vaporous lady knew the benevolent hospitality of the family that was the crucible for these two children, and all were welcomed in the white-plastered manor with the four stately two-story columns in the front and the gracious gardens here in back. Anne enjoyed the cooing of fine ladies and tagged behind them, imitating their postures, and Frankie gloried in the tales of the soldiers who once fought on the Potomac with his father and Lafayette against Arnold and Cornwallis. They, in fact, had given him the nickname “Frankie.”

  But this particular day saw guests arriving by the hundreds, leathery farmers and tattered Fighting Cocks still carrying their long rifles, neighbors of every stratum flooding down the red soil of Frederick Road, seeping from the tree line, clattering in carts, treading on foot, prancing on pedigreed steeds. The guests of honor had arrived an hour ago, before a long parade of dignitaries and escorts, coaches and grooms and footmen. Impending rain had held off all morning and there was a sparkle in the air.

  “I see a horse!” Frankie rasped finally, stretching his neck.

  “Is that all?” Anne asked. “A horse.”

  “A wonderful horse!”

  Cued by his enthusiasm, Anne ventured, “Does it have wings?”

  “It’s gray as a cloud and bears the scars of battle!” Frankie hooked his fingers onto the top bricks and dug his toes into the lips of mortar on the bottom. He forced himself up another inch. “Anne, do you know what that is?”

  “A gray battle horse with scars on his wings,” she attempted, trying to remember all the adjectives. “I think I’ll walk around and have a look.”

  She stood up from where she had carefully arranged her satin skirts into a tuffet.

  “No!” Frankie pushed her back. “Everyone will see you. Do you know what that horse is? Quick—follow me!”

  He curled his body and crept along the wall.

  Anne followed him, not bothering to curl up. After all, she lived here.

  Frankie kept his head low, lest hidden enemies spy his golden hair.

  At this historic moment the children were interrupted in their reconnaissance by three of Terra Rubra’s slaves hurrying down the walk with baskets of aromatic bread. It was the rolling butterball Maybel and her two skinny adopted daughters, Corabel and the other one.

  “What is the game today?” Maybel called out in that crackly voice. She cocked her round body, fixed her glower on the boy, and spoke with deep-throated elegance as Frankie’s grandmother had taught her as a child. “Mr. Frank, are you storming the Bastille again?”

  Frankie did not straighten up. “I’m doing reconnaissance.”

  “Don’t you go interrupting your elders at their business, mind. This is a so-important day, a so-important day.”

  Frankie nodded and crept past her and her skinny daughters. “Pardon, ma’ams.”

  “You are pardoned,” Corabel or the other one said.

  Frankie came to the end of the wall with Anne behind him, and peeked around into the courtyard, seventy-five-feet deep to the structure of the house and beautifully gardened terrace.

  And there, tied to the hitching post, was the horse.

  The horse. The horse of glory and victory.

  “Do you know what that is?” Frankie whispered. “Long neck, short back, high withers … look at the legs. Long legs. Lean, muscled body … good hindquarters … and the small head with a dished face, large wise eyes … Oh, my dear sister, that is an Arabian!”

  “Why do you start sentences with ‘oh’?”

  The boy studied the body and form of the chalk-gray horse as it drew a breath and sighed it out, showing a sculpted rib cage which carried the heart of a champion.

  “All thoroughbreds can trace their bloodline back to three Arabians, founding sires from the Orient. They were mated with the best of English mares. Their offspring are marvelous racers, riders, hunters, and battle steeds. They exert themselves to the point of death if asked of them. That horse is the father of all the best horses. I must ride that horse.”

  “You’re going to steal it?”

  “I’ll return in it good condition and groom it myself every hour it resides here.”

  His sister’s mouth made an “O” of her own, but no sound.

  “Here I go,” Frank announced. “To the last man!”

  The great heart thundered beneath him. The engine of a racing horse, the natural pump of an athlete, flooded the body with oxygen from the giant lungs, increasing blood through its chambers with every beat—the boy felt it between his knees. Wind tore at the horse’s charcoal mane; the mane beat the boy’s face, the boy’s heels beat the stallion’s flanks, and the stallion beat the earth.

  The boy’s booted feet moved heel to toe with a pause between, over and over. His imagination soared. In the measured seconds, he circled the courtyard, raced out into the terraced gardens and down them as if they were the Vallum at Hadrian’s Wall. He reconnoitered behind the jardinières, took down two enemy sentries in the marigold beds, destroyed a guardhouse, and slew an Indian at the edge of the tobacco field. Worthy nemeses for him and his powerful steed-of-war! In seconds the boy and horse were in the woods, surrounded by a thousand redcoats disguised as trees. He bent forward over the stallion’s withers. The black mane whipped his cheeks.

  Heel, toe, heel, toe, heel, toe. He thundered at breakneck speed around the mansion, past the four white
pillars, along the picket fence on the front grounds, trampling the five-foot-tall hollyhocks, then up, up, and over the gate like a big gull.

  The shaded lanes raced past him, the brooks flowed beneath, the flax fields laughed as he conquered them. The power of the Arabian’s thick neck and gathered thighs and shoulders chewing up the land surged their energy through the saddle leather into the boy’s body and he was suddenly a god. In the kennels the foxhounds began to bay wildly, sensing they were being left out of something important.

  A sudden shadow passed over his face. Things began to go suddenly wrong. A massive brown form crashed across his line of sight, blocking almost everything. Under him the gray horse twisted, balked, and flung its head back, then changed course against the will of the boy at the reins, a change so sharp that the boy went dizzy for a moment. Everything was wild—turning—

  Had he fallen? Unthinkable! He hadn’t fallen off a horse since—

  Beneath him the light-gray Arabian gathered its experience, shook away uncertainly and the weight of its rider and plunged in a new direction, now with a companion—but the boy knew that brown hide, that deep bay color, and the scent of the hay from his own stables and the aroma of saddle leather burnished with the oils from his own tack room. This newcomer was one of his own, one of his father’s favorite hunters.

  A complete stranger rode the hunter, a man in a draping layered cloak, now charging alongside the boy and steering him and the stolen destrier back toward the mansion. The man rode tall in his saddle, but not up on his stirrups despite the jolting. His shoulders were back and curved downward in a frictionless posture, his deeply carved eyes were bright blue in the streams of breaking sunlight as he glanced again and again at Frank. A fan of silvering hair that had once been auburn framed the big man’s rosy face and broad cheekbones.

  The boy added up the facts of the case against him and realized with a shock to his chest just whose horse he had taken. Joy rushed up against panic and was consumed by the fragrance of adventure. The boy, the man, and the two horses hammered through the trees, over rocks and through thickets, hooves clattering and underbrush cracking beneath them. They bobbled in their saddles as they splashed through a stream, broke out onto the terrace, and then they were a cyclone again. The boy clung to his mount, stupefied, for he was no longer controlling the stallion. The gray would no longer answer the boy’s hand on the reins nor his shifting weight in the saddle. Somehow the other rider was steering both horses with superb technique and grace. The man’s hands came down with every stride to perfectly match the dip of his horses’ heads.

  Frankie’s riding skills drained away and there was nothing he could do but totter in the saddle and cling on.

  For a hair-raising moment he thought about falling off on purpose, rolling away, stumbling on his bloodless legs to the slave dormitories and hiding for a few days or months. Wouldn’t work. Anne would find him, or Corabel, and then everybody. Maybe he should join the Army for a few years. In Egypt.

  Beneath him the dappled stallion abruptly broke stride and gamboled sideways. Someone had a grip on its bridle now—a strong angry Negro man, who had come along in the big coach parked under the trees.

  “Get the lad, Billy,” another man’s voice instructed.

  Frank’s legs flew into the air, his hands fell from the reins; he was dragged by the body from his mount and spun miraculously onto his feet. His palms felt suddenly cool and wet from the sweat that had formed as he gripped the reins. He stumbled backward just in time to miss being throttled by the furious stallion’s head, the frantic reeling protests of a horse that wanted to run onward, harder, longer. Frank just wanted to run away.

  “Francis! What is this?”

  John Ross Key. Here already.

  All at once there were more people around him, many more curious people with appalled expressions and two old mountaineers who were laughing. The faces around him made a sea of salt and pepper, all the white people who could get here today mixed with all the slaves who served them and those who lived here, invited by his father to see the eminence who had given them their nation. Scowling down at Frank, with both big hands on the boy’s shoulders, was a thickly built mulatto man who looked very angry.

  Even more appalling for him were the eyes of the women now appearing behind his father. His mother, whom Anne was named after, stood just over there, where in the mornings when the weather was good she taught the slaves to read, write, and sing hymns. She was arm-in-arm with his pious and poised Grandmother Key, brought from Belvoir to attend this day. Long ago blinded while rescuing a slave from a house fire, his grandmother could not see him, but he knew she would listen for his voice, judge his resonance, his breathing, his posture, his enunciation, text, and subtext with her Puritan code of manners.

  More for her than anyone else, Frank squared his shoulders and summoned up a voice he hoped would be as elegant as hers. “I’ve ridden an Arabian, Father.”

  “The question was rhetorical. I’ve barely tamed your Uncle Phillip and here you are, complicating my life with indecorous pranks. Defend this barbarism.”

  “Ah … I … I …” Frankie heard his voice, but didn’t recognize it. If his actions were indefensible, why did his father bother asking? Aware of the many eyes on him, he squeezed out a noise. “I saw.”

  “You saw? The horse?”

  “The … opportunity.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Americans should … seize opportunity.”

  “Nobly said.” But these words were not his father’s. Somehow Frankie knew that voice, despite never having heard it before in his twelve years of life.

  His father’s voice was very different. “Turn around, Frank.”

  “Must I?”

  “Mm.”

  The boy’s stomach dropped. He turned and looked up, up, and more up. Towering over him, the grand gentleman smiled with lips pressed flat. His fog-silver hair and dark blue jacket had become legendary over the course of Frank’s young life, and everyone knew him. For Frank, though, General Washington had been an unexpected riding companion, which complicated the moment.

  “Good morning, Master Frank.”

  As the bravado of youth withered, Frank’s voice was pitiful. He did try, however, as Grandmother Key had taught him, to make a single dramatic gesture with one hand. “I do beg your pardon most sincerely, Your Excellency.”

  Finished, he drew his hand back to his chest and waited.

  “Pardoned,” the whip-hand of history said. “But not Your Excellency. We dismiss royal titles. He who is Mr. President must know that he is no king.”

  Drawn down, the boy felt coldly absurd at his own arrogance. From now on everyone would recall the legacy of the silly stripling who had exhausted George Washington’s warhorse on the John Ross Key plantation. Terra Rubra would become a subject of mockery throughout history.

  “My son has a nature for the theatrical,” his father said to the general. “Our grooms will rub down your stallion and cool him.”

  “Kind of you,” the general responded. “He is none the worse for a gallop. Nor am I.”

  Two more women appeared at the front of the gathering crowd—it was Mrs. Washington and her servant girl, whom Frank recalled being introduced to his mother as Oney Judge. The mulatto girl had a very fair freckle-peppered face and looked almost white.

  The general turned a spiritless eye on Frank and spoke slowly and with difficulty. He had a contraption in his mouth that Frank did not understand. “Would you like to meet my charger formally?”

  “Please, your … president.”

  The general waved at his footman, who brought the snorting gray around to face Frank. The horse’s flaring nostrils put droplets of foam on the boy’s face. The horse looked right at him. Right at him.

  “His name is Blueskin,” the general said. “He’s very old.”

  “He’s an Arabian, isn’t he?” Frank gasped.

  “Half Arabian. He’s big for his breed. I ride
him only for show, now and then,” the general told John Key.

  Frank’s father looked at the boy again. “Tell Mr. Washington you’re sorry.”

  Again, the boy was brutally aware of his grandmother just over there, listening.

  “I can beg his pardon,” he told them, “but I’m not sorry.”

  John Key turned a color or two.

  Everyone looked at Frank. Everyone—the sun, the moon, the gods, the winds—

  “Is that so?” the general asked.

  “I will cherish the experience, sir. I cannot regret it!”

  “Frank,” his father droned in warning.

  “Integrity,” the tall man said. He didn’t smile, but seemed satisfied as he looked at Frank. “You’re a capable horseman, young man. And you have a sense of honor.”

  Frank simply stood there, shaking and sweating. Was the general making a joke?

  “Blueskin is one of my favorites,” the general said with difficulty, and patted the horse’s sweaty neck, a gesture of deep familiarity. “I lost Nelson, my excellent sorrel battle horse, just last Christmas. He was twenty-seven.” But now the general was no longer speaking just to the boy, but to all the people gathered around. Everyone wanted to hear everything, anything, he had to say.

  What must that be like? For everyone to know your name?

  Speaking was a struggle for the tall man, Frank noticed again, as the general hesitated over the letters f and s, and kept his mouth almost closed even when speaking. The s-sounds came out like sh.

  Battle horse. Frankie heard the words over and over. Suddenly he had a thousand questions. Had it been grand? Was it song and story, glory and pride? What was battle like? Was it like anything?

  But humbled as he was, he had no courage to ask.

  The general gazed around the grounds, so calm that at any given pause he might have been posing for a portrait. “What is Terra Rubra’s acreage?”